Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

A Breath of Fresh Air (Ballantine Reader's Circle)

A Breath of Fresh Air (Ballantine Reader's Circle)

by Amulya Malladi

On the night of December 3, 1984, Anjali waits for her army officer husband to pick her up at the train station in Bhopal, India. In an instant, her world changes forever. Her anger at his being late turns to horror when a catastrophic gas leak poisons the city air. Anjali miraculously survives. Her marriage does not. A smart, successful schoolteacher, Anjali is now remarried to Sandeep, a loving and stable... (more)

Too Small to Ignore: Why Children Are the Next Big Thing

Too Small to Ignore: Why Children Are the Next Big Thing

by Dean Merrill, Wess Stafford

The time has come, argues Dr. Wess Stafford, for a major paradigm shift: Children are too important and too intensely loved by God to be left behind or left to chance. Children belong to all of us and we are compelled to intervene on their behalf. We must invest in children–all across the world. There are strategic, persuasive reasons–beyond love and kindness–to invest in children. Today they may snuggle into... (more)

Unaccustomed Earth

by Jhumpa Lahiri

From the internationally best-selling, Pulitzer Prize–winning author, a superbly crafted new work of fiction: eight stories—longer and more emotionally complex than any she has yet written—that take us from Cambridge and Seattle to India and Thailand as they enter the lives of sisters and brothers, fathers and mothers, daughters and sons, friends and lovers. In the stunning title story, Ruma, a young mother in a... (more)

NisanitFadia Faqir

Nisanit

by Fadia Faqir

A powerful socio-political novel, Nisanit, depicts love, compassion, sacrifice, suffering and lost innocence in an atmosphere of conflict, hatred and oppression. Nisanit's three entwined narrative lines show the Arab-Israeli conflicts through the eyes of Shadeed, the Palestinian guerrilla fighter; David, his Israeli interrogator; and Iman, the young Arab woman in love with Shadeed. The three main... (more)

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

by Junot Diaz

This is the long-awaited first novel from one of the most original and memorable writers working today. Things have never been easy for Oscar, a sweet but disastrously overweight, lovesick Dominican ghetto nerd. From his home in New Jersey, where he lives with his old-world mother and rebellious sister, Oscar dreams of becoming the Dominican J. R. R. Tolkien and, most of all, of finding love. But he may never... (more)

The Joy Luck Club

Love in the Time of Cholera (Oprah's Book Club)

Love in the Time of Cholera (Oprah's Book Club)

by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The Woman Warrior : Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts

The Woman Warrior : Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts

by Maxine Hong Kingston

A Chinese American woman tells of the Chinese myths, family stories and events of her California childhood that have shaped her identity.

We Are All Suspects Now: Untold Stories from Immigrant America After 9/11

We Are All Suspects Now: Untold Stories from Immigrant America After 9/11

by Tram Nguyen

Known as Little Pakistan, the community of Midwood, Brooklyn, has suffered a remarkable exodus in the years since 9/11. One sixth of the community—20,000 people—has left in search of liberty. In an ironic reversal of the American dream, this immigrant community now lives in fear, witnessing the unjust detainment or deportation of family members, friends, and neighbors. Tram Nguyen reveals the human cost of the... (more)

The River Wife: A Novel

by Jonis Agee

From acclaimed novelist Jonis Agee, whom The New York Times Book Review called “a gifted poet of that dark lushness in the heart of the American landscape,” The River Wife is a sweeping, panoramic story that ranges from the New Madrid earthquake of 1811 through the Civil War to the bootlegging days of the 1930s. When the earthquake brings Annie Lark’s Missouri house down on top of her, she finds herself... (more)

Citizen 13660

by Mine?. Okubo

LIT

Mexican American Women Activists: Identity and Resistance in Two Los Angeles Neighborhoods

Mexican American Women Activists: Identity and Resistance in Two Los Angeles Neighborhoods

by Mary S. Pardo

When we see children playing in a supervised playground or hear about a school being renovated, we seldom wonder about who mobilized the community resources to rebuild the school or staff the park. Mexican American Women Activists tells the stories of Mexican American women from two Los Angeles neighborhoods and how they transformed the everyday problems they confronted into political concerns. By placing these... (more)

The Bride Wore Red

by Robbie Clipper Sethi

These thirteen linked stories are framed by the experiences of Sally, an American doctor and Deshi, her Indian husband, whose two cousins follow his example and refect their arranged marriages for American brides.

Spirit Car: Journey to a Dakota Past

by Diane Wilson

One day I realized that my entire back seat was filled with relatives who wondered why I wasn’t paying more attention to their part of the family story. . . . Sooner or later they all come up to the front seat and whisper stories in my ear. Growing up in the 1950s in suburban Minneapolis, Diane Wilson had a family like everybody else’s. Her Swedish American father was a salesman at Sears and her mother... (more)

The Bluest Eye

by Toni Morrison

The chronicle of the tragic lives of a poor black family in 1940s America. Every night Pecola, unlovely and unloved, prays for blue eyes like those of her white schoolfellows. She becomes the focus of the mingled love and hatred engendered by her family's frailty and the world's cruelty.

Portrait in Sepia: A Novel (P.S.)

by Isabel Allende

In nineteenth-century Chile, Aurora del Valle suffers a brutal trauma that erases all recollections of the first five years of her life. Raised by her regal and ambitious grandmother Paulina del Valle, Aurora grows up in a privileged environment but is tormented by horrible nightmares. When she is forced to recognize her betrayal at the hands of the man she loves, and to cope with the resulting solitude, she... (more)

Notes of a Native Son (Beacon Paperback)

Notes of a Native Son (Beacon Paperback)

by James Baldwin

Originally published in 1955, James Baldwin's first nonfiction book has become a classic. These searing essays on life in Harlem, the protest novel, movies, and Americans abroad remain as powerful today as when they were written. "He named for me the things you feel but couldn't utter. . . . Jimmy's essays articulated for the first time to white America what it meant to be American and a black American at the... (more)

Death Comes for the Archbishop

by Willa Cather

Willa Cather's best known novel; a narrative that recounts a life lived simply in the silence of the southwestern desert.

Brick Lane: A Novel

by Monica Ali

After an arranged marriage to Chanu, a man twenty years older, Nazneen is taken to London, leaving her home and heart in the Bangladeshi village where she was born. Her new world is full of mysteries. How can she cross the road without being hit by a car (an operation akin to dodging raindrops in the monsoon)? What is the secret of her bullying neighbor Mrs. Islam? What is a Hell's Angel? And how must she comfort... (more)

Hang a Thousand Trees with Ribbons: The Story of Phillis Wheatley (Great Episodes)

Hang a Thousand Trees with Ribbons: The Story of Phillis Wheatley (Great Episodes)

by Ann Rinaldi

Kidnapped from her home in Senegal and sold as a slave in 1761, Phillis Wheatley--as she comes to be known--stuns her adopted country by becoming America's first published black poet. Includes a reader's guide.

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